Goldman Sachs to pay £170m to settle gender discrimination lawsuit

Goldman Sachs will pay £170million to settle a long-running lawsuit that alleged women were consistently paid less than men and deprived of promotion opportunities.

The gender discrimination lawsuit, which started in 2010, said female employees were undervalued and blocked from progressing in their careers because of company-wide bias.

The two sides agreed to the settlement yesterday before the case went to trial in New York next month.

The payment will be shared among the 2,800 female former associates and vice presidents who brought the claim against the Wall Street bank. These women primarily worked across the investment and securities divisions.

‘After more than a decade of vigorous litigation, both parties have agreed to resolve this matter,’ said Jacqueline Arthur, Goldman Sachs’s global head of human capital management. ‘We will continue to focus on our people, our clients and our business.’

Under the terms of the agreement, the bank will hire independent experts to analyse its gender pay gap and ‘to conduct an additional analysis on performance evaluation processes’. Adam Klein, a lawyer at Outten & Golden who represented the women in their claim, said the settlement ‘offers meaningful relief to our clients’.

The original claimants were former Goldman employees Cristina Chen-Oster and Shanna Orlich, who first sued the company in 2010 and won the right to lead a class-action lawsuit in 2018.

The pair argued that men had better prospects for promotion with performance reviews they said were driven by a ‘tap on the shoulder system’ where men backed each other to climb the ranks.

Allison Gamba, a woman represented in the class action, said she was ‘proud’ of the final settlement.

Gwen Rhys, chief of campaign group Women In The City, said it was disappointing the action took so long. ‘We are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century and women are still having this fight,’ she said.

Jamie Fiore Higgins, former Goldman managing director, also published a memoir last year about her time at the bank, which detailed a ‘sexist and outdated culture’.

Examples include the mother-of-four, who was one rank behind partner, being told to stop talking about her children at work because it was ‘too motherly’ and colleagues making ‘mooing’ noises at her and making crude gestures after she used breastfeeding rooms at work after giving birth.

Goldman said it ‘strongly disagrees’ with the characterisation of its culture described in Higgins’ book.